Six weeks ago, a 9-year-old macaque, Pager was hooked up to a Neuralink system - Elon Musk’s mind-machine interface company. He was trained to play video games in exchange of banana smoothie. Now the monkey is seen playing games like Ping-pong using only his brain.
The company recorded his activity during this time. They implanted more than 2,000 electrodes in his motor cortex to record his activity and fed them to machine-learning algorithms wirelessly.
Decoder algorithm sensed modulation in neurons of the monkey and permitted the system to predict movements of hands.
It was done with the help of a mathematical model of neural activity and the corresponding joystick movements.
Pager’s brain waves were monitored by the researchers to adjust the system. A joystick was manipulated by the monkey before disconnecting controller.
Pager is now playing the video game without any manual input and only with its ...